Marketers and advertisers increasingly use social media networks, such as Facebook®, Twitter®, LinkedIn®, MySpace®, Google+®, Tumblr®, YouTube®, Youku®, Weibo®, Renren® and others to run social media campaigns. The social media campaigns enable the marketers to connect with customers, followers, fans, employee, and members of the social media network. These social media networks provide tools, such as Facebook® pages, or Twitter® handles to implement the social media campaigns.
Typically, a social media campaign is a marketing campaign that runs on social media networks. The social media campaign may include messages, advertisements, notifications, promotional information, public service announcements, news, event announcements etc. published on one or more social media networks. These social media campaign may include a series or grouping of advertisements or messages relating to a particular corporation, product, or theme. For example, a social media campaign may relate to a corporation, such as Samsung® and provide details of its upcoming products. A social media campaign may also relate to a theme and provide a series of advertisements or messages around a certain time of the year (e.g. fall, holiday, summer), certain dates (e.g. Halloween, Christmas, Father's day, Independence Day), or certain subject (e.g. baseball season, football season, back to school) and so forth.
A social media campaign may span across multiple social media networks or be directed to only one such network. For example, a large multinational corporation such as Apple®, may develop separate Facebook® pages for each product line, such as iPod® where followers, fans, customers, and potential buyers can post comments, reviews and share content. Apple® may also create different Facebook® pages for each country. Similarly, Apple® may have multiple Twitter® handles and YouTube® channels for each product line.
Marketing on social media networks is witnessing a paradigm shift with the increase in the popularity of user-generated content (UGC). User-generated content refers to any content created and uploaded to the Internet by a non-media professional, for example, a professional quality video uploaded on YouTube®, a product feedback left on Amazon® website, an image posted on Instagram®, or a massage posted on Facebook®.
On social media networks, such as Facebook® success of social media campaign depends to a great extent on member participation, sharing and posting of content, such as, messages, likes, and comments etc. Researches have shown that a member of a social media network is more likely to contribute or participate in a social media campaign when he/she notices that other members are participating and contributing.
To ensure success of social media campaign, marketers provide various incentives and promotion schemes to members who contribute user-generated content to their social media campaigns. User-generated content not only adds to the credibility of the social media campaign but also helps in reaching out to a wider audience. None of the existing solutions provide an integrated solution to procure and use user-generated content in a social media campaign. Also, none of the existing solutions provide an integrated management of user-generated content across social media campaigns.
In addition, the advent of the wearable computing devices such as smart watches, for example, Sony SmartWatch® and Samsung Galaxy Gear®, and smart glasses, such as Google Glass® have led to further proliferation of the user-generated content. None of the existing solutions provide an integrated system for procuring, utilizing and managing user-generated content from such wearable computing devices.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated, relative to other elements, to help in improving an understanding of the embodiments of the present invention.